Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s a perimeter out there now. Like a fence. Just think of it as the DMZ.”

  Blank faces.

  “The Berlin Wall. Great Wall of China. We’ve got a threshold now. We’re as good as any nation-state. No outsiders.”

  J.C. said, “Are you making fun of us?”

  “What? No. I’m just being, I’m just being stupid.”

  They were grateful for their honey buns and ham. I said, “Don’t think badly of me, but I’ve got to go bring this food to the family in 7.”

  Resignation.

  The family in 7 was subdued. Latest news: Cases of plague in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Vermont and Florida. Inexplicable distribution pattern. Degree of contagion unknown. Possibly, plague bandits were apportioning disease at random. Possibly, victims were treated before lethal effervescence downed everyone in sight. Maybe the highly patriotic American was releasing plague in measured doses all over the country. Maybe, in breeding new virus from the ur-strain, some potency was lost. No one knows anything. Speculation is rampant.

  I introduced myself. First time anyone was relieved to find out I was a junkie. If junkie, then inmate; if inmate, plague-free. They were grateful for the food. They worried about Margaret and Sandra. They’d been in town, exposed. What if they came back?

  There was Larry, the grandfather, who’d been three years old during the influenza debacle of 1918. He struck me as the sort of old man who is always trying to make relevant his experiences of yore, and for whom the plague came as a welcome reprise of them—the sight of his father and uncle dead, his elder brother, too, victim to an epidemic that took 200,000 Americans in one month.

  There was his daughter, Jill, and the kids: two teens, one toddler. I found them arranged around the bed, playing a board game like Life, but not quite. All but the toddler were entranced by the fate of their avatars as they coursed through the game to the end. In times of crisis, I guess auguries are found wherever you look.

  Of the teens, there was a boy in the swan song of puberty and a girl whose friends the boy probably jerked off to at night. His shorts hung well below the knee, his T-shirt well past the elbow, which excess concealed the distinctions of obesity but not the condition itself. By contrast, his sister chose to articulate her fat in vestments that hugged the body—stretch jeans and tank—which, for their bravado, made her seem even more diffident than her brother. I did not know where to look, so I settled on the toddler, who kept one fist in her mouth and the other pounding the bed so that avatars Jill and Larry flew off the board with annoying frequency. In sum, they were a family like any other, whose opted recourse to preservation was here.

  The game ended. Boy teen had been remanded to wolves in a district that did not fall under the king’s purview, he was shit outta luck. Girl teen and Jill settled for indentured servitude on the outskirts of town. Larry ascended to the throne. In lieu of having to listen to him discourse on influenza—When I was a boy—the family trained its attention on me. It was not unbidden. I’d been clucking my tongue and shredding napkins. I’d been saying: Any day now. The family was resolute in all things, including focus. So now they were focused on me.

  I said I didn’t much see the point in them hiding. The staff had already busted the prom teens, to no effect. Likely everyone had heard them arguing. And anyway, what good from secrecy? The boy teen agreed. He thought the best way to secure the property was simply to take charge of it. Girl teen thought he’d seen too many Commando movies. Jill demurred, said, “Becky, don’t talk to your brother that way.”

  “What do you mean ‘secure the property’?”

  Here was Larry’s chance. He had huge lips, lips like two slugs in a bunk, so that when he spoke, you could not see in his mouth at all. Maybe this was for the best. “In 1918, we shut down every public gathering in the country. Parades, ball games, shows. Nothing was too drastic. And we still lost everyone.”

  He seemed to relish these memories of a time when life was precious for its transience, when men of science ceased to prate about medicine, when men of the cloth ceased to prate about God, when questions outnumbered answers and the country was ripe for growth, even as so many of its people died.

  “What I mean,” said boy teen, “is that we need to get a system in place. Being here in the boonies only makes sense if we can make sure no one else gets in.”

  “That’s why there’s the fence,” said Jill.

  “And the guards,” said Becky.

  I smacked my head. “Oh, great, now we have guards?”

  Becky seized her tank top and plucked it from a wedge of fat around her waist. “Saw them myself. A sorry bunch. Guys who work here, I guess.”

  Boy teen was unimpressed. “It’s not enough. Where does the food come from? So long as food gets delivered, there’s a breach.”

  Larry was nodding. “In 1918, there was no place to run. Not like in the fourteenth century, where half of Florence spirited away to villas in the country. Everything comes back. It’s painful, but I guess that’s how it goes.”

  “Can we grow our own food?” Jill ventured.

  I cocked my head. How does a woman handle three kids and a father near dotage without having any common sense?

  At this point, there was a disturbance outside the door followed by what sounded like a coconut smack against the wall. On instinct everyone went silent. Boy teen killed the lights. I looked out the peephole just as J.C. came bursting through the door. I was going to have a lump the size of Texas on my forehead. He was panting and flushed.

  “What happened to you?” I said. “Where’s Sam?”

  At mention of her name, he looked panicked, like he’d forgotten. And in fact he had. “Shit, we have to get her.” He turned from one face to another, looking for a volunteer. He tugged at my sleeve. He really wasn’t a day over nineteen. “I, I can’t go back out there,” he said. “Sam’s in your room, can’t you just get her?”

  The toddler seemed to pick up on J.C.’s anguish, as toddlers do, and began to wail. Becky, with unsettling dexterity, removed her wristband and shoved it in the baby’s mouth. Jill said, “Becky!” but then yielded to compromise, in which she replaced band with bottle. The effect was nearly as good.

  “Can’t go out there why?” boy teen said. “What’s out there?”

  I snapped at him. “Look, boy teen, this is not Dungeons and Dragons.”

  “Did you just call me boy teen?”

  I was suddenly conscious of how little authority I had here. The situation, whose stakes I did not as yet understand, was getting away from me. Where was my mother? I wanted to call Eric. What if anarchy had overtaken New York? I stood up straight. “Fine, I’ll go get her. If you hear a scream, Roswell is no lie.”

  Blank stares.

  I let myself out. Soon as I shut the door, I pressed my back against the wall and listened hard. My stomach was a loony bin, and the desert the darkest place on earth. So as not to attract strangers at night, the staff had killed all the courtyard lights. I couldn’t see shit. My room was four doors down, so I began to count knobs, never leaving the safety of the wall. I did not get far. I stepped in something wet and phlegmy. The sensation was so gross I forgot how to walk and fell over. The landing was soft. I felt a button imprint my cheek, hair graze my lips, and I flew off the thing, reeling until within touch of F-7, whose door I banged on repeatedly, saying, It’s me, it’s Lucy, let me in, and fearing, somehow, for my life.

  J.C. looked right past me. “Where’s Sam?”

  My hands were shaking, and I glared at the dark print my shoe had made on the carpet. Becky followed my stare and gasped. Jill was in the bathroom, nursing. Boy teen, Christopher, could not contain his fear or enthusiasm, which were here commingled. He asked if it was blood.

  Larry shook his head. “Oh, boy,” he said, like: Here we go again.

  “What is that out there?” I said, trying to imbue my voice with calm and, perhaps, the kind of ferocity that c
ommands respect.

  At this, J.C. fell apart. “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to. He wouldn’t let go.”

  So that thing I fell on was human. This ruled out nine out of ten possibilities I had in mind. Unfortunately, the tenth was no consolation.

  “What happened?” Becky asked. “Is—is he dead?”

  “Oh, God,” I said, because I had not even checked. All that blood, how could he be alive?

  “You have to go out there and check,” I said.

  “I’m not going out there,” he said. “No way.”

  Jill walked in with the baby strapped to her chest. She took one look at us and returned to the bathroom.

  “I’ll go,” Larry said. “I been to war.”

  He could barely stand unaided. I said I’d go with him. This time, we left the door open so as to make use of the light. It was a man all right. Fallen to the concrete. His blood stained the wall. I gathered he’d hit his head with some force and slipped to the ground. The wall was unfinished plaster, runnels and peaks. I imagined his head snagging on the way down, and my stomach lurched. Larry squatted next to the body. No pulse. I watched over his shoulder, leaning in, but just barely. The only dead body I had ever seen was my father’s, but I can’t say I really looked. Before that, there had been an open-casket viewing of my aunt Petra, but since her car had slammed into a divider that catapulted her out the windshield and down the pavement for several feet, it hardly seemed credible that the unblemished figure in the casket was her or even human.

  We walked back to F-7.

  J.C. was standing just inside the door. “Where’s Sam?”

  “The man’s dead,” I said. “Please tell me it was an accident. We have to call the cops.”

  “No way,” Christopher said. “They could be infected.”

  Even Larry seemed to agree.

  I brought my palm to the lump on my head, which had, I imagined, the compass of a Ping-Pong ball.

  J.C. stared at his hands, front and back, mesmerized by what he had done. “He came out of nowhere. I was just taking a walk, and there he was. He looked insane. Said he lived on a ranch not too far from here with his blind uncle, but that his uncle complained of fever and a sore throat and that he’d been to town just days before, in fine health. So the guy just split. Left his uncle to die. Town was too far away and he knew about this place, so he came here. He’d been walking for a day and a half, at night, too. He was hungry. He needed water. But he just looked so sick and crazy, I only wanted to get away from him. I was covering my mouth and trying to get away, but he grabbed my shirt and wouldn’t let go! So I shoved him.”

  “You shoved him,” I said.

  Becky asked if a dead person could still give us superplague.

  Good question. If you got it from people coughing, sneezing, or breathing on you, it stood to reason that the dead could not transmit. On the other hand, I had no idea. I wished Aggie were still alive. She would know. So would Hannah, in fact. Mother and I had to get back to her.

  “No idea,” I said. “Though I guess we’ll find out.”

  “Great,” Becky said. “I didn’t even want to come to this place. There was a party tonight. I could have been at the party.”

  “Like you had a date,” Christopher said.

  “Shut up.”

  “What are we going to do?” J.C. said. “My wife is pregnant!”

  “We?” Becky said. And then, “Oh my God. How do we know he didn’t give it to you?”

  She backed away from him. I couldn’t help it, I did too.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “I covered my mouth. I wasn’t with him for more than two minutes. He probably didn’t even have it!”

  J.C. was getting frantic.

  Larry just shook his head. I felt bad for him, having to watch history repeat itself. It should not happen in the same lifetime. At the very least, you’re supposed to die and come back first.

  “I’m calling the police,” I said. “Someone has got to keep a level head.”

  This meant, of course, having to retrieve my cell phone of the shoddy reception, which meant having to step over the unknown man, who had left his blind uncle to die. Probably the uncle would not have died if his nephew had just stuck around. Probably he was still not dead. I hope he called someone. But what if he didn’t have a phone? Everyone has a phone. But what if he didn’t? What happened if this sick blind man was withering away, starving to death, or, I don’t know, eaten by coyotes! I had to call the police.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out his shape. The glint of his pupils. Absolutely vacant. I guess I was supposed to close his lids, but no way was I touching a dead man. I tried using a stick to turn out his pockets, maybe to give a relative his belongings. Then I noticed a ring on his finger. He was married. Strangely, this seemed to humanize him enough so that I could take his hand and free the ring. It came off easily. His hands were stiff. Despite the stare, his face wore evidence of panic, jaw clenched, brow furrowed, lips sealed. I wondered if this was how my father looked when they laid him out. If the anxiety that ended in suicide dwelled on his face long after he had released himself from it.

  I sat there for what felt like a long time. From a distance came the sounds of a train slicing through the night. The backs of my legs chilled against the concrete. My ass was going numb. I was aware of these sensations the way you might notice a traffic jam on your walk home. Bully for them, but who cares. I was tired. And something about the fatigue, the dead man, this place—it got me thinking in a way I tend to reject, which is to say, in a way that substantiates an interest in things philosophical and thus lifesaving. Me and the dead guy were just two bodies in the desert. On principle, I had little care for the body, which negligence felt like a strategy toward enlightenment. By contrast, here was a man who’d do anything to protect his body, and in whose will began abasement. Something like kenosis, when Christ abandons the form of God for the corporeal. Say we are all born in the form of spirit, what then if you assert the body? Me and this guy, we had totally different ideas about how to deal. But I didn’t know whose was better. The choice seemed to ride on whether we resurrect or reincarnate, though neither option yields to the proposal that with each generation, we only die, die again, die better.

  I shook my head. In this madhouse-once-rehab, getting clean seemed like the least pressing business of all.

  I stood, failing to note the man’s hand still in mine. It fell from my grip with a thud.

  In my room: Sam, Margaret, Sandra. I was not surprised. The sisters were hardy and resourceful. An electrified fence manned by a Bluebonnet intern was not going to deter their homecoming. I found them talking birth rites. Could Sam have her baby underwater and call it a baptism, too? The celerity with which she had taken to the sisters, how she had settled herself between them with zero discomfort, made me suspect she had lacked for women all her life.

  I flung myself in a chair with floral-print cushion, which actually kept with the hodgepodge furnishings doled throughout the rehab.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” said Margaret. “You’re a sight.”

  “So are you. How’d you get back here, anyway?”

  “Ingenuity,” said Sandra.

  “Cutoff switch,” said Margaret. “And a couple guys looking the wrong way.”

  I told Sam her husband was adamant she join him in 7. She seemed not to have noticed his absence. Or that they were married. Clearly, she did not want to leave the embrasure that was the sisters wise. But I wanted her out. As she left, I counted down from three. When the scream came, Margaret leapt to her feet and made for the door, but I put up my hand and shook my head. “J.C. will tell her.”

  “Tell her what?”

  And out it came. They were appalled, of course. Equally by the accident as by the refugees’ horror of their return from town. As for calling the police, they were none too sure this was a good idea. If the rehab shut down, what would become of them? Of us? By now, word of the death and the
refugees, the bandits and cavalry at neighboring farms, had likely spread throughout the rehab. Our mandate had grown twofold: help the junkie, avoid everyone else. It would be bad news if junkie and outsider joined forces. To what end? So some asshole could get a proper burial while the rest of us got evicted, jailed, or deathly ill?

  I went for my phone, which I’d hidden under the mattress. Battery dead. I went for my charger, which I’d also hidden under the mattress. No charger. This fucking rehab! Now even if I wanted to call the cops, I’d have to go to the office and use a landline, which meant having to encounter staff, which seemed ill advised under the circumstances.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” I said.

  “Wait it out. Go to group. Get clean.”

  “Are you kidding? What about the food? The boy teen—Christopher—was saying so long as food gets brought here by truck, we’re at risk.”

  Margaret laughed. “That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

  Was I being mocked? Who knew, at this point, what was prudent and what was extreme? Minutes ago, I thought it was crazy, too, but here I was, parroting the latest.

  “She’s just teasing,” Sandra said. “We’ve been thinking about the food.”

  I was not even relieved. “And?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  There came a silence among us, in which all retreated to thought, ostensively to solve our communal problem. But I was elsewhere, studying the carriage of both women and marveling at how little each registered anxiety or distress. At least not the kind to which I was accustomed, to which I attributed 90 percent of my drug use: I can’t deal, I need to get high. Despite everything that had happened in the last three hours, I rarely left contemplating drugs. How to acquire drugs. How to acquire and hoard and take drugs. It was like the thrum outside the shrink’s office. The fan in the background. I simply assumed the same held for every addict, recovered or not.